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One thing no one has ever been able to accuse Box’s co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie of is being wishy-washy when it comes to his view about the cloud. Levie is perhaps the tech world’s number one poster boy for the advantages the public cloud brings. He’s built his business on the cloud, he takes every opportunity to evangelize the benefits of the cloud and his company likes to pour scorn on the non-cloud dinosaur vendors out there.

So any softening of the language from Box is of utmost interest, especially so when the company is heading towards a public listing. So when Whitney Bouck, general manager of Box’s enterprise business told the Wall Street Journal recently that some data will likely always live on-premises, it was an interesting comment. Bouck is quoted by the WSJ who wrote that:

Ms. Bouck said that Box viewed hybrid architecture as “bridges” to the cloud, which has inherently better economics. And while she expects cloud to win out, in the long run, she conceded that there will be a certain amount of on-premise data that will stay there.

This comment is even more interesting when seen in light of the fact that Box announced recently that it has signed up as a customer. And not just for occasional and limited use, according to the company the deal, which has taken two years to get over the line, includes 300000 GE employees globally. It would also see GE become Box’s largest customer. While Box has a few educational institutions with over 100000 seat deals, this is the first corporate customer to have such a user count.

Of course there are no details available about the deal terms – it’s a fairly safe bet that GE got some pretty generous terms here. But more important than the actual deal size is the fact that Box was able to convince GE that it was safe to entrust its data with the fledgling vendor. According to the article, the two years spent negotiating the deal involved the ability for GE to manage its own encryption keys – the lack of this functionality in the regular Box product has long been something that has gained the company some criticism. Commenting on the deal and in particular the security aspects around it, GE said that:

[the Box deal will] provide IT with the control and administrative capabilities required to govern and protect sensitive content at scale

Hence it seems fairly certain that Box has had to talk a much more hybrid story in order to get this deal over the line. And this softening of position could well be the start of a more gradual move to a more hybrid-friendly box. In language that seems to vacillate between the hardline cloud and more hybrid-focused approach, Bouck is reporting as saying that:

Box viewed hybrid architecture as “bridges” to the cloud, which has inherently better economics. And while she expects cloud to win out, in the long run, she conceded that there will be a certain amount of on-premise data that will stay there

Of course this is all fuel for those vendors following a different approach. One such vendor, Egnyte, is strongly focused on a hybrid storage strategy. Its CEO, Vineet Jain is often to be heard balancing the value that cloud collaboration brings with the heightened security that more traditional storage approached had. In commenting on the topic, Jain told me that:

While the cloud has clear functional and economical benefits, there will be no substitute for the security and low/no latency benefits of on-premise storage - at least not in the near future. While it is without a doubt that the cloud adoption curve will continue to rise and we will see bigger deals being done at the Enterprise level, there is no urgency from companies to get rid of existing on-premise hardware. What we are seeing in real-time negotiations is that companies are wanting to utilize the strengths of their existing hardware and leverage the new benefits of the cloud to create a unique infrastructure that suits their needs. Rather than thinking of hybrid architecture as a bridge, companies are seeing this best-of-both worlds approach as the future

Of course the future lies somewhere in the middle – Box is correct in saying that a large proportion of files will end up on the public cloud, but there is still an ongoing need for private storage to be provided for. That reality is the reason I’ve long been talking about file sharing and collaboration as a “fabric” that spans a number of different approaches to storage – public, private and hybrid. This is Box’s future and, as they move towards there IPO and the pressures for even more momentum, it will be interesting to see how their hybrid story develops.